HUNTING HITLER: Karga Seven Pictures for “History”
You can be sure that if the team behind “Hunting Hitler” had actually found the by now 126 year old Fuhrer alive and well in Argentina, or at the very least found irrefutable proof that the darkest of twentieth century icons had survived his self-inflicted Götterdämmerung in Berlin and escaped to South America to live happily ever after in an Aryan jungle hideaway with Eva Braun and Blondi the dog, the result would have been worldwide syndication on mainstream Media channels, banner headlines in the World’s newspapers and jealous rivals claiming the whole thing was faked and a conspiracy. As it is “Hunting Hitler”, which is now half way through an eight episode run on the cable and satellite TV channel “History”, took to the airwaves with all the stealth of a type IX ocean going U-boat surfacing off a beach in Patagonia at dead of night. This suggests that, as with many current ostensibly historical documentary strands on TV, the latest epic from what seems to be the increasingly satirically named channel “History” is more about delivering style, concept and ratings than any historical or factual substance. In fact “Hunting Hitler” falls securely into the genre of pseudo-historical infotainment programmes such as “Ancient Aliens”, which occupy and cynically exploit, the space left by genuine historical uncertainty and debate and debase the concept that TV can both inform and entertain.
It is easy to identify the common threads such programming displays. Most examples are shot in one or more exotic locations in HD and widescreen. They also feature casts of “characters” and amateur/fringe researchers, rather than people with genuine subject expertise like professional historians and archaeologists. The cast then assembles, often with a lot of tech’ and gizmos to lend a spurious scientific credibility to the enterprise and proceeds to conduct an increasingly breathless search for an artefact or a “truth”, which “must be told”, but which has been withheld from “the people”; either by the willfully closed minds of mainstream academics, or by a malevolent conspiracy orchestrated by powerful entities and governments.
The narrative then manufactures a simulacrum of history based on genuine and often highly detailed, but uncontextualized, material which is used to support and impart gravitas to acres of pure speculation, wishful thinking and in the worst cases, the conscious misrepresentation of the subject in hand by the deliberate omission of accepted academically checked and referenced scholarship.
With the programme in the can TV producers creating this kind of documentary fast food, [not very intellectually nutritious and often bad for you], then usually blow one of three main types of dog whistle to attract their audience’s attention; Lost Treasure, Aliens and, as in this series, Nazi’s, with the whole farrago often being packaged under the generic title of “conspiracy”.
In the case of anything to do with the word “Nazi’s [which is used interchangeably with the other dog whistle word “Hitler” as it is here], the dog whistle works because, as everyone in the magical parallel universe of TV land knows, while it is a case of “Nazi’s, I [we] hate these guys,” [Source: Dr I Jones]; at the darkest levels of human psychology and folk memory, while most of us fear and are repulsed by what Hannah Arendt called the Nazi’s “banality of evil”, at the same time we are also fascinated and perhaps some are even secretly thrilled by it.
This means that in a media world of fragmented and diminishing audiences for the traditional channels, the perceived ability of the Nazi’s to deliver ratings, whether for ill advised amateur jaunts to Latvia to dig up dead Nazi soldiers and their still lethal weapons a la “Nazi War Diggers”, or bogus manhunts such as we see in “Hunting Hitler”, transcends any residual fear of accusations of bad taste.
In the context of Nazi Conspiracy TV the premise of “History’s” new infotainment is simple. Bob Baer, a former CIA spook and Middle East specialist turned author and media pundit, who is alleged to be the model for George Clooney’s character in the film “Syriana”, is masterminding the search for the, missing for seventy years, dictator out of a swish [but probably rented by the hour] TV set of an office in down town Los Angeles. The Robin to Mr Baer’s Batman in the “Hunting Hitler” utterly bats cave, is Dr John Cencich. Dr Cencich is described as a war crimes investigator and is currently senior professor of criminal justice at California University of Pennsylvania. However, most of the time he seems to be there simply for Mr Baer to have someone to talk to and discuss plot points with. Mr Baer then strokes his white cat [not really, he actually spends most of his time looking at a laptop, or projection screen] and tasks his “Assets” on the ground to set off in search of clues to the whereabouts of nonagenarian Nazi’s and the remote sites of their secret Latin American lairs.
The field team Mr Baer ostensibly deploys are an intriguing bunch.
- Tim Kennedy, is billed as ex US Special Forces with experience of going after “high-profile targets” the implication is the targets included Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. However, he is actually better known to US audiences as a Mixed Martial Arts [MMA] fighter. That is Cage Fighter to you and me.
- Gerrard Williams, is a former BBC and Sky News journalist turned author with a line in reheated conspiracy theories about Nazi escapology which has thus far utterly failed to convince any mainstream historians.
- Steven Rambam, is a sometimes controversial Private Investigator, TV presenter and freelance Nazi hunter who claims to have investigated “nearly 200 Nazi collaborators and war criminals in the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia.” In Canada he claimed to have located, interviewed and obtained confessions from at least fifty war criminals while posing as a Professor from a factitious university, although only one case appears to have come to court.
- Retired US Marshal turned professional man hunter and reality TV veteran Lenny DePaul completes the line up.
However, what is most intriguing about the casting for “Hunting Hitler” is that none of the principles have any published track record in the skills and expertise which would seem to be most useful in investigating a seventy year old missing Nazi case involving the highest levels of Government. Principally detailed knowledge of the range of Nazi period and post war diplomatic and military archives, of the organisation and operation of the various branches of the Nazi State and its foreign relations, detailed knowledge of the leading personalities of Nazi Germany and detailed knowledge of the politics of Spain and Argentina during World War Two and the immediate post war period.
But then again, if they did possess such expertise, or even consulted those who did, there would be no programme. “Hunting Hitler” is not about a full assessment of the evidence for the escape of Hitler from Berlin in 1945, for and against.
Neither is it about testing that historical case, if necessary to destruction. Instead the series is about the protagonists suspending disbelief and undertaking the pretense of a genuine investigation, when what we are seeing in reality is a kind of scripted adventure designed to establish a counterfactual historical fantasy.
This element of scripting is important because, as we know, even with the combined technical and human resources of the entire US intelligence community and its allies, it took over ten years of painstaking detective work to track down Osama Bin Laden to that compound in Abbottobad.
All Mr Baer and his field assets in “Hunting Hitler” have in order to hunt down the most infamous [non] fugitive in history is a TV budget reputed to be $2 million per episode, some laptops running link analysis software [which as any investigator will tell you is only as good as the information it searches; if the data is hearsay, wishful thinking and garbage so will be the conclusions] and some wizzy “Call of Duty” style graphics added in post production.
They also have a production schedule to meet so we also know from the get go that we are watching a carefully constructed TV artifice, where, just like World War Two, we know the ending already. We know that the team won’t actually find Hitler, or even proof the dictator ended up playing happy Fascist families in Argentina.
In which case the show runners must keep the audience engaged by producing regular cliff hangers and even injecting some faux jeopardy, such as the crew getting told off for some apparently illicit filming in General Franco’s former seaside villa, as though twenty-first century bad manners was somehow evidence of a cover up for Fascist skullduggery seventy years ago.
Essentially then, “Hunting Hitler” is the bastard offspring of the computer game “Call of Duty” [Nazi Zombie level] and “Zero Dark Thirty”, Katherine Bigelow’s film about the search for Osama Bin Laden. However, rather than having to do their own detective work tracking down couriers , locating safe houses and buying potential sources high end Italian sports cars, the “Hunting Hitler” team do at least have the combined resources of the FBI’s declassified reports and the published archive of most of the nonsense written on this subject since the 1950’s.
In fact the bulk of the locations and theories investigated are easily available via Google. For example the idea that Hitler was lodged in May 1945 at the Benedictine Abbey of St. Julian of Samos in Galicia, Spain, was published in a local newspaper El Progreso in May 2013 and video interviews with an alleged witness to the stay, Senor Julio Barreiro Rivas were posted on YouTube.
Not that these anti historical antecedents of the material in “Hunting Hitler” are ever fully credited. The same witness Snr Barreiro Rivas appears, unnamed for reasons we can only guess at, in an online interview with Baer and Cencich in episode five of “Hunting Hitler”. However, what the interview does not explore are other claims by Snr Barreiro Rivas, such as the claim that Hitler also died and is buried in Galicia.
Neither do the team discuss the suggestion that the supposedly mysterious landing of a German JU52 transport in a potato field near Corneas, also discussed in “Hunting Hitler”, is actually a confused folk memory of the actual forced landing of Spanish Air Force C.A.S.A. 352-L, the Spanish built version of the JU52, which ran out of fuel and force landed on a farm at Corneas on 23 July 1950 . The two events seem to coincide even down to type of aircraft and the number of passengers, “four or five” soldiers. Thus for the programme not to discuss this possible confusion is at best the product of shoddy research and at worst it is dishonest.
However, the availability of these archives of ordure is in one way a good thing for the producers because, lavish as it is, the production budget probably would not extend to buying some Argentinian Neo-Nazi, with the inside track to finding Adolf, a new Lamborghini. One of the methods apparently used by the CIA to reward its informants in the Bin Laden hunt.
What we do get for the money are the trappings of an expensive high tech investigation. In a visual cliche, time and locations are shifted with shots of computer screens, running what we are told are military grade search programmes so that the puppet masters back in California can appear to be updated on developments in real time and task the search assets on the ground in Germany, Spain and South America to direct their search effort to the latest speculative location or dubious witness report. Cut to sweeping aerial shots of SUV’s on dirt roads and interiors shots of the principles looking serious. Cut to another up-sum to pad out the running time and in case anyone missed the supposed significance of any of the “evidence” [or forgot which continent we were on] during the Ad’ break.
Once we do arrive on location the production goes into pseudo undercover documentary mode, with lots hand held shots of the team trying to get into dilapidated houses and getting awfully excited by “discovering” things [so spontaneously that the director already has the reverse angle shot set up]. The team is also regularly interrupted by locals who just happen to walk up to our heroes to supply crucial leads and introductions. This begs the question why didn’t the team just employ researchers rather than hanging about on street corners? That is a really unreliable, not to mention expensive, way of gathering evidence when you have a TV crew hanging around, even on an alleged $16 million budget.
It is also an invitation for people to roll up and tell you what they think you want to hear in the hope of a free lunch, or even an appearance and their fifteen minutes of fame. But of course employ local researchers and fixers they did and co-presenting “asset” Gerrard Williams is used to this methodology of chatting up the locals having already written about many of the people and places shown in the episodes of “Hunting Hitler” in a recent book and having turned that book into a film [see below].
While our intrepid investigators are tapping up the locals with leading questions of the “When did you see Nazi’s and Hitler here?” kind, Mr Kennedy, the Special Forces cage fighter is sent off to play with more technology, launching his [rather small] drone to make a 3D terrain model of a very small section of a very big Argentinian beach.
This is supposedly in the hope of turning up the landing site of the Hitler party and perhaps a find, such as a dropped Gold Nazi Party badge, which will prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr and Mrs Hitler landed at this location from a U-boat, noticed only by a local housewife glancing out of her kitchen window.
Except that even the most comprehensive modern 3D terrain map could prove no such thing and the find of a badge would simply prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone deposited a gold Nazi Party badge at the location at some point between the 1930’s and now.
Given the quality of the evidence offered by the series, most sensible researchers investigating the subject of alleged Nazi landings in Argentina would long since have settled for using Google Earth and Wikipedia and saved the location budget for something more important to the success of the production; the wrap party springs to mind; especially as the peer review process for Wikipedia articles is more effective than that on display interrogating the witnesses, evidence and arguments in “Hunting Hitler”.
In fact while watching “Hunting Hitler” thePipeLine could not help but be reminded of the frantic energy and preposterous plot lines of that other high tech thriller employing puppets, “Team America World Police”. You half expect the director to cut to a wistful Adolf in his jungle hideaway singing “Lonely, I’m So Lonely” as Mr Baer’s team of CIA lite operators close in.
Of course one of the selling points for “Hunting Hitler” is that this is an international manhunt and from time to time the team shift focus from Argentina to Berlin and Spain to see how Hitler “could have” escaped the beleaguered city in April 1945. Could have, but did not. What is entirely lacking in “Hunting Hitler” is the historical context. It is a staple of this kind of programming that the viewer never hears from anyone with genuine subject expertise who might offer some inconvenient truths like facts which might question, let alone contradict, the premise of the programme.
Thus the audience is never told that by 1945 Hitler was a physical wreck almost certainly suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease, and various other real and psychosomatic afflictions. Crucially the audience is also kept in the dark about the well evidenced view that psychologically Hitler seems to have been determined to bring about his own immolation and that of the German people, amid the ruins of the Reich. A suicidal intention he confirmed in his last political testament, typed by his Secretary Traudl Junge on 29 April 1945, the day before his suicide, which stated;
“I have decided therefore to remain in Berlin and there of my own free will to choose death at the moment when I believe the position of the Fuehrer and Chancellor itself can no longer be held.”
However, this genuine and well investigated material does not stop the team postulating that Adolf and his entourage then chose to escape Berlin in the most complicated way possible, supposedly leaving behind a pair of hapless doubles to be murdered in a cover up. A cover up with which every survivor of the bunker colluded for the next sixty years, even when put under the toughest of interrogations by the experts of the Soviet NKVD.
In fact accounts of life in the Reich Chancellery bunker suggest that towards the end, far from planning complex “escapes” worthy of a Hollywood thriller, most people trapped there were more concerned with discussing the most effective way of committing suicide, getting drunk and having sex.
Nonetheless, the thesis of “Hunting Hitler” is that the Hitler party did slip out of the Fuhrer Bunker , unnoticed by anyone. They then supposedly traveled several miles through the wrecked U-Bahn to Tempelhof airport to board a long range aircraft, crossing thousands of miles of airspace completely controlled by the allies to enter Spain. The first leg of this black shirted version of the Great Escape [or rather “Escape to Victory”, a film which is more historically accurate than “Hunting Hitler”] was allegedly conducted via a hitherto unknown secret tunnel, the coordinates and existence of which are revealed by some ostentatious tapping on tiles in a Berlin subway and a magic hand-held GPS which works underground. This is a good trick as GPS needs line of sight to the satellites the system depends on.
A later episode picks up the story in northern Spain and visits the monastery at Samos, where features which an archaeologist or architectural historian would suggest look very like the foundations, drains or sewers of a Spanish monastery dating back centuries are transformed by wishful thinking careful investigation into “secret tunnels”, in part constructed by an 85 year old “witness” Snr Barreiro Rivas again, down which the chronically ill Hitler could have stooped crawled and squeezed his way to and from the local Guardia Civil station.
Arriving at night, using the front door while wearing a heavy overcoat with the collar turned up would have been simpler. Similarly the “Secret Tunnels” on the Canary Islands turn out to be the well known facilities belonging to a Spanish Navy, built by the Dirección de Construcciones e Industrias Navales Militares, the construction of which continued into the 1950’s; while the three antenna in the municipalities of Lugo Abadin and Cospeito built to service the German Lorenz blind navigation system in 1940 are also well known and published.
Not much chance either that the “secret” Canary Islands base was visited in late April 1945 by U518, the U-boat Williams has claimed had been used to convey Hitler to Argentina. The prospect of such a visit becomes even less likely because the most basic research on a standard U-boat website reveals that U518 was almost certainly lost with all hands north west of the Azores on 22 April 1945, several days before Hitler’s alleged “escape”, having been depth charged by the US Navy destroyer escorts USS Carter and USS Neal A. Scott. While Williams’s in his book casts doubt on this sinking, citing a British naval officer’s memorandum, underwater explosions and surface oil were reported.
Indeed, even if the boat survived the depth charging, or was not even the boat depth charged on 22 April, Williams must account for the fact that neither U518, nor her twenty three year old veteran captain Hans-Werner Offermann and her crew of fifty six were ever seen again.
Away from the fate of the U-boats of Wolfpack Seewolf, establishing a credible chronology is not “Hunting Hitler’s” strongest suit either. The Hitler party’s alleged exodus from Berlin and transfer to South America is supposed to have taken place in April and May 1945 according to the “Hunting Hitler” team. However, the presenters happily cite corroboration for an established “Rat Line” processing escaping Nazi’s through Spain using a document which is clearly shown to be dated after January 1948, two and a half years later than Hitler’s supposed escape.
The documents shown on screen also refer to arrangements for one fugitive Nazi as allegedly being made during Eva Perón’s visit to Spain which took place in July 1947. That HD filming does have its uses then as you can freeze frame the scene and establish that the Perón regime’s attested assistance to escaping Nazi’s after World War Two cannot be used to suggest that the mechanism for the escape lines was already in place in May 1945 while the War was still in progress. Particularly so as Juan Perón only became President of Argentina in June 1946, over a year after Hitler is supposed to have arrived in Patagonia.
Adding to the misleading chronology set up by “Hunting Hitler” most mainstream historians accept that the so called “Rat Line” to Argentina, assisted by the Roman Catholic Church, only began to operate formally after a meeting in Rome in March 1946 where Argentine bishops Antonio Caggiano and Agustín Barrére were used as a diplomatic back channel to the Vatican passing on the message that “the Government of the Argentine Republic was willing to receive French persons, whose political attitude during the recent war would expose them, should they return to France, to harsh measures and private revenge”. Incidentally, “Hunting Hitler” also fails to mention that one of Perón’s predecessors, President Ramirez, had suspended diplomatic relations with the Axis Powers in January 1944 and that in March 1945 the Argentine Junta had actually declared war on the Axis.
As for exfiltration by submarine from northern Spain in 1945, all the known cases of senior Nazi’s and other war criminals entering South America, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, travelled by regular commercial means, usually under false identities on Red Cross passports and were still arriving by this method as late as 1950.
In the end, with its Los Angeles based puppet master and human and electronic assets out in the field “Hunting Hitler” comes across as nothing less than a would be macho reboot of “Charlie’s Angels” [the tacky 70’s TV version, not the 21st century Hollywood reboot], but with combats, testosterone and big boys toys such as drones and SUV’s, replacing the guns, big hair and bikinis. In other words the entire series is “Jiggle TV” apparently aimed largely at the predominantly male subsection of the TV audience which surfs conspiracy websites while sitting in their underpants under a tin foil pyramid.
Worse, this travesty of a pseudo documentary series is not even original tosh, just a reheating of the lukewarm pseudo historical leftovers which have been congealing on the rim of TV dinner plates since the 1950’s. Indeed, such is the cynicism of the exercise that the series obscures that fact that “Hunting Hitler” “field asset”, investigative journalist Gerrard Williams has already had two lower profile tilts at the “Hitler escaped to Argentina” windmill, having co-written a book on the subject with Simon Dunstan, “Grey Wolf- the Escape of Adolf Hitler” published in 2011 and probably available in a remainder bookshop near you [that is where thePipeLine got its copy], subsequently directing a film with the same title.
The film was so well researched that Hitler, the evangelical vegetarian who allegedly suffered from chronic flatulence as a result and who annoyed his generals by insisting they ate the same bland mush as he did at Fuhrer conferences, is shown apparently eating chicken and is described by alleged witness Catalina Comero as enjoying ham and sausage.
Well he was German.
Of course the presence of this kind of easily checked red flag of an error should have ensured Ms Comero’s testimony was placed in the file marked “mistaken or mad”. The fact that Williams includes it in his film is just another reason to discount the entire rotten edifice of this sloppily researched “theory”.
It is also worth noting that after the publication of “Grey Wolf ” in 2011 in Williams was even accused by a one time collaborator, Argentinian journalist Abel Basti, of plagiarising some of the work in own book “El exilio de Hitler / Hitler’s Exile: Las pruebas de la fuga del führer a la Argentina” published in 2010, although Williams strenuously denied the accusation.
However, while we are on the subject of reheated left over offal, in 2009 another documentary on this same subject was broadcast in the “Mystery Quest” strand. The title of the episode was “Hitler’s Escape” and the broadcaster was; “History”, the same broadcaster which is now showing “Hunting Hitler”. A goldfish probably has a longer memory than the “History” commissioners and executives and a goldfish does not treat the intelligence of its audience with what often seems close to patronising contempt.
Back in the world of of genuine historical research, the “Hunting Hitler” team could have referenced the well known story of Yelena Rzhevskaya, a military interpreter attached to Russia’s 3rd Shock Army as it entered Berlin in May 1945. Ms Rzhevskaya was an operative for the infamous SMERSH [Death to Spies] counter intelligence organisation and was among the investigation team which entered the Fuhrerbunker to investigate Hitler’s fate in May 1945 when the ashes in the Reich Chancellery garden were barely cold. As well as capturing many of the witnesses to the double suicide and dog murder [Hitler ordered his aides to try out his stock of Cyanide pills on his ill fated German Shepherd, Blondi]; witnesses such as Hitler’s SS telephonist Rochus Misch; the Russian team were also able to track down and interrogate both the dental assistant, Käthe Heusermann-Reiss, and the dental technician, Fritz Echtmann, who had worked for Hitler’s dentist, Dr Hugo Blaschke. The two identified distinctive distinctive gold bridgework which had been recovered from the bomb crater cremation at the Reich Chancellery and this, coupled with a comprehensive suite of evidence gathered as close to the actual event as was possible, soon convinced the Russian team that Hitler was indeed dead, as was Eva Hitler, nee Braun.
The same conclusion was reached by British investigator, the historian and then intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper and by US Intelligence as well as every serious historian and biographer of Hitler since. However, as the leading military historian Anthony Beevor describes in his masterly account of the fall of Berlin [Berlin: the Downfall 1945, Penguin 2007], Rzhevskaya and her colleagues, who possessed the most secure chain of evidence on the Fuhrer’s fate, were forbidden on Stalin’s direct orders to discuss their findings with anyone, no matter how senior, on pain of death. An order which extended even to the victor of the battle for Berlin, Soviet Marshall Georgy Zhukov. The Russian leader wanted to use the uncertainty about Hitler’s demise as a stick to beat the western powers, by suggesting that some new devil’s alliance was being put together to confront a Russia now dominant in Eastern Europe.
As Ms Rzhevskaya wrote when her memoir was finally published after the collapse of the Soviet Union;
“By the will of fate, I came to play a part in not letting Hitler achieve his final goal of disappearing and turning into a myth. Only with time did I finally manage to overcome all the obstacles and make public this ‘secret of the century’.
“I managed to prevent Stalin’s dark and murky ambition from taking root – his desire to hide from the world that we had found Hitler’s corpse.”
Unfortunately then for the increasingly threadbare credibility of “History” as a channel, some of its commissioning editors seem not yet to be in on the seventy year old “secret” that Hitler did actually die in Berlin on the afternoon of 30 April 1945.
Either that or the Executives and Commissioning Editors at “History” are utterly cynical commissioning programme after programme which chase ratings using the dog whistle words “Hitler”, “Nazi” and “Conspiracy” and treat the name of their channel as an exercise in Post Modern irony- surely not?
They seem equally ignorant of the evidence suggesting that the muddying of the waters leading to those reported rumours in the FBI files was down to a combination of Stalin’s political strategy to in the early hours of the Cold War, coupled with the centuries old truism in folklore that when a famous or notorious figure dies in a manner which seems mysterious or banal when compared to their fame or infamy, a certain portion of the public simply will not allow them to die.
This well known and studied psychological effect led people to report dozens of “Hitler” rumours to the FBI and other intelligence agencies in the years immediately following World War Two. Doing what they do, as former CIA employee Mr Baer should know, those agencies quite properly followed up the reports and rumours with greater or less enthusiasm and diligence so that the resulting paper trails appeared as the “Hitler files” which were indeed maintained after the war.
This is not a mystery, let alone the cover up of the fact that Hitler survived the war. It is routine intelligence work. Anything credible in those files relating to an escape by Hitler would have been either actioned, or weeded out to avoid either compromising operations and personnel, or embarrassment to the authorities concerned. There was nothing credible about the stories so the files were not actioned, or weeded. By way of analogy, visit the UK National Archive at Kew and you can inspect the files kept by the Ministry of Defence on UFO sightings. The presence of which does not mean the that MoD spent most of the Cold War preparing for an attack from Mars rather than Moscow.
Thankfully at least one of the “Hunting Hitler” presentation team seems to be aware of quite how ridiculous the whole enterprise is. While questioning the Soviet handling of the forensic evidence, in an interview with Joseph Napsha of Trib Total Media, Dr John Cencich added this thunderous academic endorsement of the importance of the whole multi million dollar “Hunting Hitler” production.
“the results of this project warrant a footnote in the history books”
thePipeLine ventures to suggest the footnote about “Hunting Hitler” echoes the noted commentator on military affairs, Captain E Blackadder’s, conclusions about the European Alliance system and the efficacy of pre World War One deterrence,
“There was one tiny flaw…It was bollocks”
On the bright side, with “Hunting Hitler” reduced to a mere footnote, there is now clearly a gap in the media market to discuss what really happened to Hitler. Here at thePipeLine we have downloaded those explosive FBI files which “Hunting Hitler” is in part based upon. After detailed link analysis [OK, we read through them a few times], and a bottle of rather nice Rioja in honour of Adolf’s alleged visit to Franco’s Spain and also as tribute to another of Kaga Seven Pictures productions “Booze Traveller“, we have prepared a pitch for our own Hitler conspiracy series to submit to the History exec’s. Our thesis shows beyond reasonable doubt that der Fuhrer was indeed smuggled out of Germany by Wild Bill Donovan and OSS operatives as part of Operation Paperclip and was resettled in Memphis under an assumed identity. Other witnesses [sadly now dead] go on to suggest that in the 1950’s Hitler changed his face, name and career direction, going on to have a distinguished career in the music industry until, faking his own death in 1977, he started a whole new life flipping burgers. “The Elvis Hitler Conspiracy” is coming to your TV or mobile device soon.
Or perhaps not.
We understand history, archaeology and the importance of properly gathering and testing genuine evidence.
We also respect our audience and treat them as sentient human beings.
But above all we won’t get the commission because we forgot to include any Aliens.
